Ani DiFranco Stands Strong in the Fire of the Song

Ani DiFranco

Ani DiFranco is a singer-songwriter par excellence. She is pure Americana. A hybrid artist who has collaborated with everyone from Pete Seeger to Prine, she has created a legacy built on an independent record label, Righteous Babe. That she is! It’s a righteousness that spills over into her art and her lifestyle as she is an activist, an outspoken radical who dares to challenge the lack of justice in the status quo as she stands for a diversity of causes. However, it’s her music and her approach to the melting pot of the American song that allows her to walk into the role of an alchemist who can turn the poison of trendy and shallow modernity into a healing force for grace and mercy.

Her melting pot’s ingredients includes a successful marriage of folk, jazz, rock, psychedelia, hip hop, blues, and lyrical poetry put to music. It is a wake-up call to hear her sharp incisive words alongside tremolo guitars, delta slide blues, and sampled textures that give solid ground to the sky-high insights of her lyrics. Through her music she becomes a Buddha

For over three decades she has led and influenced a generation of singer-songwriters. Her vision is that of the universal and the singular. Her legacy of 23 albums reveals an artist who has built from the foundation left for her from kindred spirits like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Janis Ian. But, DiFranco has pushed the genre envelope in ways that embraces politics and personal transformation.

Ani DiFranco’s memoir.

From the beginning, with her debut eponymous album, the melodies that have flowed from her voice and her narrative-driven lyrics have been the center of her art. These are the core gifts she brings to the table. Her style, since her 1990 album, has been classified, defined, and revised as jazz-folk, alternative rock, and Americana with mentions of the trifecta of alternative music, punk, funk, and hip hop. She is that undefinable American artist who draws from our finest traditions and creates something entirely new that is simultaneously universal and personal.

As she stands on the stage, her entire body embraces the moment of song. Whatever the story she tells or the message she brings, there is always a smile and sense of joy to her delivery. But it is that story and message that burns the fire of creativity that has created her 30-year legacy.

Perhaps, most important, she has paved the way and influenced major successful artists who in the past would have been pigeonholed and dismissed as LGBTQ fringe artists. Today, when Lady Gaga or Billie Eilish enters the mainstream of contemporary pop-rock artists, they have Ani DiFranco to thank. It took courage and a stubbornly creative tenacity to come out of the socially enforced shadows to be who she is today. In interviews she describes herself as “hetero-as-hell,” but she has traveled the width and breadth of the circle of her sexuality, and she’s not been afraid to openly talk about it in a way that is healthy game changing.

The major causes she has championed over the years have included woman rights to reproductive freedom, environmental causes, gender equity, and socio-economic justice. In many collaborations—which range from Pete Seeger and U. Utah Philips to Prince with a stop over for a duet with Jackie Chan—she has blazed another trail in her demonstration of her commitment to speaking out and acting on her convictions for the lack of justice in the world today. In 2012, she released a collaboration with Pete Seeger of the folk classic Seeger brought to the light of day the union coal workers anthem, “Which Side Are You On.” It’s a song that rings universally as true today as it did nearly a hundred years ago. She was also active with Seeger’s Clearwater Foundation and concert series to help clean up the Hudson River. On meeting Pete Seeger she told Rolling Stone in 2019, “His unassuming power came from a calm sense of purpose and a palpable lack of fear.”

Ani DiFranco featuring Prince, “Providence.”

DiFranco has described Prince, the legendary late rock ‘n’ roll legend, as “one of the most vivid people she had ever met.” Like John Cash and Bob Dylan’s bromance of the early ’60s, DiFranco and Prince became friends prior to recording together. Both artists identified with the music of the other. They formed a friendship that went beyond a mutual admiration society. They finally recorded two songs in 1999, ironically enough. Ani Defranco’s song, “Providence” for her To the Teeth album, is an ethereal, noir ode to a casual romance with a stranger. Prince’s full Paisley Park funk-rock clothes the production with background vocals and a soundtrack suitable for a David Lynch film. The song builds to a crescendo as the sexual tension is portrayed in the ecstatic drama of the song’s peaks when DiFranco sings this poetry in song:

It’s a narrow margin
just room enough for regret
in the inch and a half between
hey, how ya been?
and
can i kiss you yet?
so we talk like
nervous neighbors over a tall fence
true love
but for the lack of providence

“Eye Love U, But Eye Don’t Trust You Anymore,” for Prince’s Rave Un2, the Joy Fantastic album gave DiFranco the chance to record with Prince at Paisly Park in Minneapolis. It’s a remarkable song and performance with DiFranco providing a beautiful guitar overdub to Prince’s torch song of a romance gone bad. His vocal is pristine with the soul of a heart broken. The irony of it is that both songs begin with the narrator walking into the room as Providence boasts the beginning of an affair; the Prince song allows the narrator to walk into the room as the romance in his affair is dying. The two songs were a loving artful exchange between two friends who happened to be phenomenal in their shared artistry.

Ani DiFranco’s 2024 release, Unprecedented Sh!t, album was conceived during the Pandemic from 2020 to 2022.The collection as a whole works as a narrative of the life and times we are all experiencing in the now. The opening songs play with feeling of isolation and loneliness the nation experienced during the pandemic year as we feel the alienation of the “Spinning Room” that is linked “Virus” as we come to a place of acceptance at the weirdness of it all. There is the guilt and conceit of control in the distortion of the virus we all experienced:

I was so deeply pleased to pause this life
I think i jinxed the world and caused this strife
Yes, I longed so long for fewer nouns
I longed so well, the world shut down

Then, there are the moments of coming together again in a new birth. Her narrative on the song “More or Less Free” has the feel of re-birth, but not in a way that is full of joy. Rather, it’s awkward and strange as she ventures back out into the world. The “Baby Roe” fast forwards to the moment a woman’s right to choose is overturned by the highest law of the land. As we move into the darkness of the area of misogynistic power brokers and hollow arrogant politicians, the storyteller tells she is living through some “Unprecedented Shit.” It could have been written for the presidential election of 2024. Filling a resigned anger the singer cracks open her drink and moans in anger that she’s living through some unprecedented shit. “The New Bible” is a centerpiece of the cycle of song and story. It is a call to a new consciousness and awareness. Forget about being “woke,” this song says that we all need to wake up out of our dreamy slumber to a world that she describes in the heart of the song:

Let’s evolve into our true nature
So little flowers can bloom
In a world where relationship is sacred
And sacrifice is assumed

In the end, as the final song portrays, we turn to the children. This closing lullaby is a direct link to Ani DiFranco’s recently published children’s book. Beautifully illustrated by Julia Mathew, the book is a source of affirmation and resolved comfort that the ultimate truth of being is within us and outside of us in the soul and the world we are all connected to. She sings:

I have a life
That i am here to live
I have gifts that i am here to give
I have friends and with my friends i have fun
I have a love of the wind and of the sun
Yes, i can take heart in what’s showing
Knowing it’s all a part of The Knowing
Yes, i can take part in what’s showing
Knowing we’re all a part of The Knowing

It an apt conclusion to this fine album by one of America’s finest singer-songwriters who has grace to spare even as she gleefully takes us into her world. Through her words we can see reflected our own struggles, suffering, joys, and triumphs. And in this gospel according to Ani DiFranco, it all comes through a song and the worldview of a child.

Ani DiFranco will be at the Belly Up on Wednesday, January 22. Show starts at 8pm.